Today Microsoft's Jeff Raikes unveiled the next stage of the company's Unified Communications strategy, showing the bells and whistles that will be added with Office Communicator 2007 (which comes as a desktop client, a browser-based client and a mobile phone/PDA client), Office Communications Server 2007* and Exchange Server 2007. Basically, with Office 2007, you can go seamlessly from email to IM to video conferencing to VoIP and mobile telephony, with only one client program and a single directory. Big companies are already doing most of this stuff, of course, but typically with three or more incompatible servicess, and several incompatible directory systems.
Microsoft claimed to be supporting open standards and announced several IP phone partners such as LG-Nortel, Thomson and Polycom. In response to a question from the floor, Microsoft said it was llicensing technologies to Symbian, Palm, RIM etc so users would not necessarily be limited to Windows Mobile phones. In the switching business, the main partner is Siemens. HP and Motorola were also featured.
The cutest part of the display was a teleconference using Microsoft Office RoundTable, which is a sort of recording super-webcam that switches automatically between speakers and can handle a 360 degree view. If you are talking to four people seated around a table, you get a videoconferencing view with them side by side, more like University Challenge. The product has been shown in Microsoft's Center for Information Work (CIW), its future-office lab, and will appear with the software about a year from now. (Creative Match has a picture of prototype devices from CIW.) It was originally called RingCam.
The demo teleconference with Redmond, which I watched via LiveMeeting, was on the mission critical decision, what to have for lunch. Some argued for the superior gastric user experience of Thai food while others praised pizza's hands-on interface: "what you see is what you eat," said one. And so on.
* This used to be called Microsoft Live Communications Server, but the Live name is now being used for online services such as Windows Live and Xbox Live.
Comment: This isn't an area where Microsoft faces much competition, except from IBM with its forthcoming Hannover software, based mainly on Lotus Sametime and Notes/Domino. This should appear first, but is still playing catch-up, and brings with it the negative connotations of Lotus Notes.
